Code-Free Logic Deployment: A Peek into AAG's Vision for Empowering Non-Developers

In today's "Behind the Startup" series, we delve deep into the entrepreneurial journey of a serial innovator who has seamlessly navigated his ventures from airlines to luxury fashion. He's revolutionizing the world of Web3 and is on a mission to onboard 1 billion users by 2030. Join us as Jack Vinijtrongjit unveils how experiences across various sectors influence the vision of AAG and what lies ahead for the Web3 economy.

More Than Just an SDK: How AAG is Redefining Web3 User Experience & Bridging the Wallet Gap

Ishan Pandey: Hi Jack, great to have you here for our "Behind the Startup" series. As a serial entrepreneur, you have extensive experience in creating platforms for different sectors. Can you share some insights on how your past experiences are helping shape the vision and execution of AAG?

Jack Vinijtrongjit: Ishan, thanks for having me on the show. I’m a big fan of the series. You’re quite right to point out that I’ve worked across a number of different sectors and verticals. I think this has helped me as an entrepreneur, but, to be honest, I don’t think working across different industries – in my case, everything from airline to luxury fashion – is necessarily something exclusive to founders.

The key to making these experiences build on one another, however, rather than being unrelated areas, is to find lessons you’ve learned in one domain and apply them to another. Like Steve Jobs said, you’ve got to figure out how to join the dots. Everything I’ve learned in my previous work has led me to what we’re doing with AAG: Not just the practicalities of founding a company, but the importance of figuring out a strong vision to build around and then providing the tools to make it possible to create it. For example, I think having a strong foundation is very important because it allows us to be able to test out ideas quickly. Everything we built is modular, so while the idea may not work, we still end up with another component we can use for the new idea. You just need a guiding north-star vision to decide what you’re trying to do and how it fits together. This is how we execute ideas at AAG.

Ishan Pandey: As an individual with a background in enterprise software architecture and development, how do you intend to use this expertise to simplify access to the Web3 economy and achieve your goal of onboarding 1 billion users by 2030?

Jack Vinijtrongjit: To get to that kind of number, the fastest way is to go the enterprise route and work with companies that already have a large user base. Imagine working with a telco company that already has 70m users. In that case, you have the opportunity to onboard a large chunk of users in one go. However, while that’s great for us, it could also be viewed as a risk by them. Large companies serving an enterprise market are, totally understandably, cautious about embracing bleeding edge technologies in some cases.

They have to do the right things by their users – and that user base is very likely to contain lots of people that aren’t early adopters excited about new technology for new technology’s sake. As a result, they want to work with companies that can de-risk the opportunity for them – to make it a very cheap experiment with very little time to go-to-market, without causing disruption to their existing businesses. Once you can get to that point and arm yourself with a range of use cases they can easily understand and see validated, it becomes a no-brainer for them.

Ishan Pandey: Given your time at TIBCO Software where you worked on large-scale integration projects across various sectors, how does this experience inform your current strategies in developing and deploying AAG’s platform?

Jack Vinijtrongjit: Selling to enterprises is all about presenting a solution to a problem. You can have the best product, but by itself, that may not be good enough. We also need to align ourselves with service integrators who are already working with a lot of their clients and arm them with tools that they can use to onboard them to Web3. Imagine having 10,000 developers actively using your software because it makes their lives easier and their clients happy. That’s what I have learned from my days at TIBCO, and that’s how we are intending to scale.

Ishan Pandey: Can you elaborate on the specific ways AAG aims to achieve what you just described?

Jack Vinijtrongjit: Sure. One recent example we have is our MetaOne Wallet. Our users love using our wallet because it’s much easier to use and they feel much more comfortable because we took away the complexity of managing seed phrases and private keys. Those were major pain points we see with other solutions in the same space. However, we also understand that businesses want to control the user experience and eliminate the need to have an external wallet. So what did we do?

We used the existing components we used to create MetaOne Wallet and created MetaOne Embeddable SDK. Now businesses and service integrators can use the SDK as a tool to enable Web3 aspects of their business.

Ishan Pandey: How is your SDK different from something like Magic or Venly?

Jack Vinijtrongjit: Remember when I told you that for a business to venture its way into Web3, it must be cheap and easy, with minimal disruptions? That’s exactly what we did. You essentially get everything MetaOne Wallet provides, including all the UI. If you have not developed a wallet before, you would not have known that 60+ screens are required to provide comprehensive flows. That’s a lot of time taken away from developers being able to focus on their core features.

Ishan Pandey: That’s great. Seems like that will help save a lot of time. Are there any other reasons why developers should pick MetaOne SDK?

Jack Vinijtrongjit: It depends on what they do. One thing that I think will be quite common across is what we call Shared Mode. Let’s do this. Take your phone out and tell me how many apps you have installed.

Ishan Pandey: I would say at least 70.

Jack Vinijtrongjit: Imagine if they are all Web3 dApps. If they all use Magic or Venly, you will end up with 70 wallets because they are bound to the dApp even if you use the same credentials to sign up. Most people can’t even manage one bank account. Imagine having to manage 70. Imagine gas fees in 70 wallets: it’s a nightmare. So while a lot of SDKs allowed dApp to solve UX problems, it actually ended up creating one major UX problem. With the Shared Mode that we support, users have control of their own wallets and can choose to use the same wallet with any dApp, just like how you use a standalone wallet like MetaOne or MetaMask.

This also enables businesses to have insights into users’ behaviours since activities are on-chain. If a new user always starts with a new wallet, they would have no clue how to personalize the journey until they have collected enough information.

Ishan Pandey: That sounds like a big problem to me. I’m surprised that popular SDKs are not addressing this. With that said, having a wallet per dApp is also safer, right? What if someone makes a mistake? Wouldn’t they lose everything?

Jack Vinijtrongjit: That’s actually a very interesting point. For us, we prefer the preventative measure. We have many security measures that warn users if they are about to do something wrong. You can actually try to go to a website like Chain Abuse and try to send ETH to one of those blacklisted addresses. You will find that we will give a very strong warning that you should not. Anyway, they also have the option to create a new wallet within the same account if they so choose. It’s more about providing control to the users.

Ishan Pandey: Project Titan seems to be a significant achievement for AAG. Can you explain in more detail how this score infrastructure contributes to the scalability and security of the platform?

Jack Vinijtrongjit: Yes, Project Titan is the foundation for us. It allows us to develop and deploy new software quickly. Without having this kind of framework, it will be very difficult for a junior developer to jump in and contribute for example. We are actually working on some exciting features that will allow non-developers to also deploy business logic and test the outcome without having to know how to code. This is going to be very essential for us in the near future. You will certainly hear more about this soon as it becomes available.

Ishan Pandey: Thanks for sharing and I’m looking forward to hearing more about it. It certainly looks like you guys are always doing a lot of things. Just one last question from me. What made you decide to develop your own layer 2 protocol? It’s called SAA-KU-RU, right? Did I pronounce that correctly?

Jack Vinijtrongjit: Yes, you were spot on. Saakuru is a Japanese word that means “circle” or “activity club.” I know the double A does confuse some people. The reason we decided to have our own L2 is because we want to have some control over how the chain behaves in the future. Besides that, we have also worked with enough projects that see gas fees as a major obstacle. By building on top of Oasys, we were able to eliminate gas fees. As you can see with TomoOne, we are able to give our MetaOne users a digital pet right after they create an account. Besides being a game, it also serves two more purposes: One, which is to introduce users to how to sign a transaction, and, secondly, to make them use the pin code for authorization that they just entered so they don’t forget. I actually thought it was a genius idea when my team came up with it.

We are currently looking to onboard around seven projects to Saakuru by the end of 2023. People definitely see the benefits of having no gas fees, but at the same time, they also know that Oasys are backed by quite a few gaming giants so they are looking to benefit from the massive gaming ecosystem as well.

Ishan Pandey: Awesome! I’m going to wrap it up here for today. It’s been great catching up with you and hearing about all the exciting things going on at AAG.

Jack Vinijtrongjit: Likewise. Thanks again for having me on the show. It’s been great!

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